Articulatorium

23 February 2003
Perhaps the most intractable and looming problem is how to build the basis for perspective in the minds of people born in the mid-1980s --how to give them the tools to leap aboard the moving train of History, and/or the platform to look down upon the global landscapes of present and past, and/or the analytical frameworks to process the floods of data available. What one knows is so much constrained by where one sits, by one's personal circumstances, by the tacit models and filters through which the world is perceived. Broadening one's purview, allowing for the possibility of changing 'opinion' on the basis of new information, reconfiguring one's knowledgebase, trying on unfamiliar frameworks --these should be lifelong habits one adopts and practises in undergraduate years. My frame for this is intellectual engagement and curiosity, and it involves reading and talking and writing and seeking out stimuli across a very broad spectrum of ideas and media. Such participation in one's education is fundamentally active, something that the person does, learns to become conscious of doing, and seeks to be in control of doing: it is not something done to the person.

Reading and writing are not the only ways to realize personal mastery of learning, but they are both essential. The paradox that these central skills cannot really be taught --though they can surely be learned-- is one of the most prominent unacknowledged problems of education: we assume that students "know how" to read, and that they are more or less competent writers. We presume that they will "pick up" any skills they lack by doing assignments, by attending to red marks on papers, by osmosis from others, and by following models. The incentives to learn to "do it right" are managed by grading systems that everybody loathes but few have any workable alternatives to. Most undergraduates do not become "intellectually engaged" in their courses; they survive the lectures and the assignments and the exams, but only a few have their lives changed by what happens in courses. Those few generally make the transition to active engagement because of personal contact with a mentor, and that's what liberal arts institutions seek to foster.

The above doesn't mean to imply that courses are unimportant locales for teaching-and-learning, or even that traditional pedagogical methods are inappropriate or inadequate. Rather, it suggests that venue and activities should be the focus of critical attention by teachers and learners.

How to get complex and challenging ideas into discourse, so that the ideas become the centerpiece? How to get students to entertain alternatives to their assumptions about how the world works, and/or what are the important things to pay attention to? Sometimes the answer is based in a reading, though all too often assigned readings are at an inappropriate level for their intended readers (in essence, students don't know how to read at that level). This is a tricky problem for individuals, and even more so for a class: all too often the instructor's assumption is "if you've read xxx (or listened to what I said) you will understand...", but the conversational work to develop a shared understanding doesn't get done. The result is, too often, shallow knowledge and flaccid convictions.

One practical approach to improving the discourse is to read excerpts, chosen because they seem to illuminate the essence, or clarify a term or concept that has broad applicability. My selections from Wallerstein 1996, Wallerstein 1998, and Wallerstein 1999 are that sort of thing: they don't summarize the two sources, but they do introduce some important ideas in their context. Extracts from Worlds in Collision and Virtuous War have the same purpose. As hypertexts, with outward links to further explications of terms and to exemplary Web resources, these pages could be even more effective. They don't substitute for reading the original materials, but they are intended to give cogent reasons to read the originals and otherwise explore the ideas. They are stimulus materials.

But what to choose as such exemplary materials, and how to present them? And what to do after the reading? I'm pretty much convinced that writing is the integral next step --that the old "how can I know what I think until I see what I say?" applies here, in spades. Integrating reading and writing and conversation is the ideal, and requires a certain sort of venue (an electronic classroom, in which everybody has a workstation, and the requisite skills to be productive in the environment). I've done a fair bit of exploration of that mode, mostly in Anthropology of East Asia. It takes time, and needs followup that I often haven't made time for, so it has been only somewhat successful.

24 February
Some terminological links:

neoliberalism from Wikipedia

Kondratieff Waves from Wikipedia

The "Scramble for Africa" ought to be nicely documented in maps --indeed, there should be an ANIMATION of the process of boundary definition. Google has more than 5000 hits for the phrase. Somehow this and that just don't cut it. The Voyages en Afrique site has some cool things. I also found a nice cartoon on the Chadwick site (!) [http://www.chadwick-k12.com/Teachers/dplace/Africa2/africa_interim2.html]

Wikipedia on colonization of Africa

Subsaharan Africa summary

brief and long records from Annie for books on (more or less) the history of boundaries of Africa.

27 February
Raymond Williams on 'hegemony'

(to quote myself): Yeah, they have to confront Capital, but I've yet to find a Marxist writer who doesn't make me squirm. I haven't read the Wikipedia entry for 'capital' or the Capitalism entry either

I suspect we'll find other portentous terms that need something of the same exploration and plumbing and explication. Wikipedia's 'means of production' is another. These are terms that any educated person needs to have some notion of. Unfortunately, they're also terms that are, as they say, bandied. Part of our task is to come up with other means besides OED and Wikipedia to explore the quiddity of words and concepts, and of course there are quite a few. We keep asking: Quidnunc?

3 March
Where did I write stuff about what is it to be a Steward? This is such a basic and vital question... back in Jan 2001 I collected a lot of Web references to the concept, and quite recently I wrote some things down... gotta find the paper... and I added another set, books 2001- with some curious senses of the term.

Barry Lopez spoke at W&L last spring, and was quite direct in saying that "stewardship" was arrogant: perhaps the Land is steward of US, he seemed to prefer.

Perhaps this ought to be an empirical question for the very first exercise students do: what is the landscape of meanings of 'stewardship', and how do we situate ourselves, individually and collectively, in that landscape? Of course there are many ways to approach information-gathering and exposition of the answers to this basic question.

4 March
On the subject of WATER: The World's Water ("This site complements and supplements the book The World’s Water: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources, by Peter H. Gleick (Island Press, Washington, D.C.) ")

Several books to keep in mind:

Lewellen, Ted C., 1940-
The anthropology of globalization : cultural anthropology enters the 21st century 
Westport, Conn. : Bergin & Garvey, 2002.
GN27 .L65 2002.

The world's water : the biennial report on freshwater resources.
Washington, D.C. : Island Press, c1998-
TD345 .W674.

Markowitz, Gerald E.
Deceit and denial : the deadly politics of industrial pollution 
Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, c2002.
RA566 .M265 2002.

Groombridge, Brian.
World atlas of biodiversity : Earth's living resources in the 21st century 
Berkeley, Calif. : London : University of California Press, c2002.
CALL NO.    SCI REF QH541.15.B56 G762 2002.

6 March
We'll want to use SnipIt as a means to gather resources --set everybody up with the Powers, and over the term collect a healthy heap of references...

What is stewardship in a world where Americans are unwelcome and in danger? Should this possible reality suggest anything to us about the hubris of 'stewardship', or is it that we should be thinking of the stewards as humanity at large, and not we-as-Americans? Don't we have to include the American perspective and identity as part of the definition of stewardship?

If the program wasn't called "Global Stewardship", what differences would it make in how we think about its subject matter? It would still be about transnational issues, about the shape of the world, the way things are, the forces at work and likely to affect the future. It would still be about the effects of human activities upon landscapes and hydrosphere and atmosphere... and about expanding the understanding of how things work. Among those things are human systems, economic, political, etc... and it's impossible to approach those without a "critical" stance. But where should that begin, and end? What of the Emperor's Clothes should we begin with?

It's always necessary, and always 'safe', to concentrate on how to find information about the world; chancier and more controversial to deal with what to do with information once one has it. And events may make it necessary to take a very different tack than whatever we think we intend.

Globalization: Stiglitz's Case (Benjamin Friedman, NYRB, 15 August 2002) and A Fair Deal for the World (Stiglitz reviews Soros, NYRB, 23 May 2002).

There's a lot to read... and a necessity to try to make sense of the overload. We have to address both the task and the means to cope.

7 March
Globalization is simply the most important transformation of the last 20+ years. Who studies globalization as a process, or an outcome? An empirical question... and how could we answer it? [Of course one way is via Library of Congress subject headings: 185 hits, and the breakdown by subtopic is instructive. 'Globalization' seems to have made it to LCSH status in 2000, which isn't much depth but is likewise instructive. A keyword search gets 730 hits, the oldest 1987. 3 from 1988, 4 from 1990, 5 from 1991, 10 from 1992, 15 from 1993, 21 from 1994, 24 from 1995, 37 from 1996, 53 from 1997, 60 from 1998, 72 from 1999, 130 from 2000, 144 from 2001, 135 from 2002... and still accumulating, of course]

Genesis of Suicide Terrorism (Scott Atran, Science 7 March 2003) seems like essential reading in the "what's going on in the world?" sector of the course. The underlying question is: to what can one commit? Some especially important bits:

...A legitimate hypothesis is that apparently extreme behaviors may be elicited and rendered commonplace by particular historical, political, social, and ideological contexts.

...In the Middle East, perceived contexts in which suicide bombers and supporters express themselves include a collective sense of historical injustice, political subservience, and social humiliation vis-à-vis global powers and allies, as well as countervailing religious hope (supporting online text on radical Islam's historical novelty).

...Another strategy is for the United States and its allies to change behavior by directly addressing and lessening sentiments of grievance and humiliation, especially in Palestine (where images of daily violence have made it the global focus of Moslem attention)

...We also need to investigate any significant causal relations between our society's policies and actions and those of terrorist organizations and supporters. We may find that the global economic, political, and cultural agenda of our own society has a catalyzing role in moves to retreat from our world view (Taliban) or to create a global counterweight (Al-Qaida).

"unipolar world" Google search

Net Primary Productivity from ORNL (see NPP Map for ArcIMS interface)

10 March
A section on Chiapas:

Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds A Storm and a Prophecy (This essay by Insurgent Subcommander Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army was written in August of 1992. It was not released publicly until January 27, 1994)

THE ZAPATISTA NETWORK - A CLEARINGHOUSE OF ZAPATISTA INFORMATION

the tijuana bible of poetics! ("a weblog on American and Latin American literature and culture, made by a Mexican writer and translator.")

The New Economy of Water: The Risks and Benefits of Globalization and Privatization of Fresh Water (Pacific Institute)

a harvest of 'globalization' books from 2002 and 2003, including a number of titles worth considering for addition to the list of books for review

Corridos

McKenna, Teresa.
Migrant song : politics and process in contemporary Chicano literature 
Austin : University of Texas Press, 1997.
PS153.M4 M55 1997.

Herrera-Sobek, María.
The Mexican corrido : a feminist analysis / María Herrera-Sobek.
Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1990.
PQ7180 .H4 1990.

Corridos sin Fronteras (Smithsonian)
The Ancestry of Mexico's Corridos Merle E. Simmons Journal of American Folklore 76:1-15 (1963) and The Ancestry of Mexico's Corridos: A Matter of Definitions Americo Paredes The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 76, No. 301. (Jul. - Sep., 1963), pp. 231-235.

...and I've ordered

Author Nicolopulos, James
Title Reversing Polarities: Corridos, Fronteras, Technology, and Counterdiscourses
Reflexiones 1998: New Directions in Mexican American Studies. Padilla, Yolanda C. (ed. and introd.). 173 pp.
U of Texas P. Austin, TX; 21-44, 1998

Pena, Manuel H.
Folksong and Social Change: Two Corridos as Interpretive Sources
Chicano Border: Culture and Folklore. Villarino, Jose (ed.); Ram.rez, Arturo (ed. and introd.). ix, 243 pp.
Marin. San Diego, CA; 84-107, 1992

11 March
NewRuleSets Project of the Naval War College

Council on Foreign Relations "Must Read" list on globalization ...indeed, the CFR homepage has lots of things we need to be paying attention to.

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and who links to that site ...includes Peace and Security Funders Group with lots of links to organizations. See also NYU U.S. Defense Information Links

globalsecurity.org

GlobalSecurity.org is focused on innovative approaches to the emerging security challenges of the new millennium. The organization seeks to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons and the risk of their use -- both by existing nuclear weapons states and those states seeking to acquire such capabilities. GlobalSecurity.org aims to shift American conventional military forces towards new capabilities aligned with the post-Cold War security environment, and to reduce the worldwide incidence of deadly conflict. The organization is working to improve the capabilities of the American intelligence community to respond to new and emerging threats, reducing the need to resort to the use of force, while enhancing the effectiveness of military forces when needed. GlobalSecurity.org also supports new initiatives utilizing space technology to enhance international peace and security. (Mission Statement)

International Water Management Institute and its World Water and Climate Atlas (register to download dataviewer and grids by continent) and Global water outlook to 2025: Averting and Impending Crisis

More messing with Human Development Report and ArcView: /nigh/hdr2002a.apr has the laboriously hand-corrected data from the 2002 HDR. I had to change each field's TYPE to numeric and do various other undignified things, but that yielded a fairly clean set for GDP and HDI. It shouldn't have been such a hassle...

12 March
Some 'water resources' materials from Science:

Global Water Resources: Vulnerability from Climate Change and Population Growth (Charles J. Vörösmarty et al. Science 2000 July 14; 289: 284-288 ) --maps of relative change in demand and pop'n and demand

...to the best of our knowledge, no global-scale study has articulated the geographic linkage of water supply to water demand defined by runoff and its passage through river networks. We present a high-resolution geography of water use and availability, analyzing the vulnerability of water resource infrastructure to future climate change, population growth and migration, and industrial development between 1985 and 2025.

Flow and Storage in Groundwater Systems William M. Alley et al. Science Volume 296, Number 5575, Issue of 14 Jun 2002, pp. 1985-1990)

Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems (Peter M. Vitousek et al. Science Volume 277, Number 5325, Issue of 25 Jul 1997, pp. 494-499.)

Human alteration of Earth is substantial and growing. Between one-third and one-half of the land surface has been transformed by human action; the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined; more than half of all accessible surface fresh water is put to use by humanity; and about one-quarter of the bird species on Earth have been driven to extinction. By these and other standards, it is clear that we live on a human-dominated planet.
...Globally, humanity now uses more than half of the runoff water that is fresh and reasonably accessible, with about 70% of this use in agriculture. To meet increasing demands for the limited supply of fresh water, humanity has extensively altered river systems through diversions and impoundments. In the United States only 2% of the rivers run unimpeded, and by the end of this century the flow of about two-thirds of all of Earth's rivers will be regulated...

--see others in this Human-Dominated Ecosystems Special

Forecasting Agriculturally Driven Global Environmental Change (David Tilman et al. Science Volume 292, Number 5515, Issue of 13 Apr 2001, pp. 281-284. )

Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges (Elinor Ostrom et al. Science Volume 284, Number 5412, Issue of 9 Apr 1999, pp. 278-282.)

Anthropogenic disturbance of the terrestrial water cycle Vorosmarty CJ, Sahagian D BIOSCIENCE 50 (9): 753-765 SEP 2000 --see also Global-Scale Environmental Effects of Hydrological Alterations: Introduction (Rosenberg et al., same issue)

Water in a changing world Jackson RB, Carpenter SR, Dahm CN, McKnight DM, Naiman RJ, Postel SL, Running SW ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS 11 (4): 1027-1045 AUG 2001

Meeting ecological and societal needs for freshwater Baron JS, Poff NL, Angermeier PL, Dahm CN, Gleick PH, Hairston NG, Jackson RB, Johnston CA, Richter BD, Steinman AD ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS 12 (5): 1247-1260 OCT 2002

Global estimates of market and non-market values derived from nighttime satellite imagery, land cover, and ecosystem service valuation Sutton PC, Costanza R ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 41 (3): 509-527 JUN 2002 --and see datasets

Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy Wackernagel M, Schulz NB, Deumling D, Linares AC, Jenkins M, Kapos V, Monfreda C, Loh J, Myers N, Norgaard R, Randers J PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 99 (14): 9266-9271 JUL 9 2002

World water dynamics: global modeling of water resources Simonovic SP JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT 66 (3): 249-267 NOV 2002

The Changing Water Paradigm: A Look at Twenty-first Century Water Resources Development Water International March 2000

13 March
I did a keyword search for 'global' in Annie: 4168 hits, not exactly a big surprise that it's lots. A Subject search gets 537 items, spread over 127 Subjects. Interesting ones:

Global Environmental Change
Global Warming
Globalization

Mowrer, Edgar Ansel, 1892-
Global war, an atlas of world strategy, by Edgar Ansel Mowrer and
Marthe Rajchman; with an introd. by the Hon. Frank Knox.
New York, W. Morrow, 1942.
D743.3 .M65.

Miller, E. Willard (Eugene Willard), 1915-
Global geography [by] E. Willard Miller, George T. Renner and 
associates.  Maps by Harold K. Faye.
New York, Crowell [1957]
G115 .M59.

Wolflisberg, Hans J.
A century of global operations: the flavorful world of Nestlé 
New York, Newcomen Society in North America, 1966.
HD9015.S93 N48.

McLuhan, Marshall, 1911-
War and peace in the global village: an inventory of some of the 
current spastic situations that could be eliminated by more 
feedforward / [by] Marshall McLuhan [and] Quentin Fiore.  New York : Bantam books, 1968.
CB478 .M24 1968b.

Califano, Joseph A., 1931-
The student revolution: a global confrontation
New York, Norton [1969, c1970]
LA186 .C28.

Study of Critical Environmental Problems.
Man's impact on the global environment : assessment and 
recommendations for action ; report.
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [1970]
QH541 .S73.

Global systems dynamics; international symposium,
Charlottesville, Va., 1969. Edited by E. O. Attinger.
New York, Wiley-Interscience, 1970.
HM13 .G53 1969.

Wilson, Thomas Williams.
International environmental action; a global survey 
[New York] Dunellen [1971]
HC79.E5 W53.

Barnet, Richard J.
Global reach : the power of the multinational corporations 
New York : Simon and Schuster, [1974]
HD69.I7 B32.

Emmel, Thomas C.
Global perspectives on ecology 
Palo Alto, Calif. : Mayfield Pub. Co., 1977.
QH541 .E445.

Hudson, Michael, 1939-
Global fracture : the new international economic order 
New York : Harper & Row, c1977.
HF1411 .H82 1977.

Goals for mankind : a report to the Club of Rome on the new 
horizons of global community / Ervin Laszlo, et al.
New York : Dutton, c1977.
CB430 .G6 1977.

The Global political economy of food / edited by Raymond F. 
Hopkins and Donald J. Puchala.
Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, [1978]
HD9000.6 .G56.

The Global predicament : ecological perspectives on world order /
edited by David W. Orr and Marvin S. Soroos 
Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c1979.
HC55 .G56.

Michael Mandelbaum The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the 21st Century

Cristina Garcia Dreaming in Cuban

Humans as the World's Greatest Evolutionary Force (Stephen R. Palumbi Science Volume 293, Number 5536, Issue of 7 Sep 2001, pp. 1786-1790.)

The Water Systems Analysis Group is involved in a number of research activities focused on the broad-scale aspects of the terrestrial water cycle. These activites include data set development, modeling, and global change impact assessment

14 March
This from Ron:

What to do with the Zapatistas for this course would be to contrast the 'global' internet view of the Zs as an antiglobalization icon (when 40000 italian autoworkers declared themselvs "Zapatistas" in 1995? there were suddenly more Zs in Italy than in Chiapas!) with the local reality of an Indian social movement, the lastest in 500 years of rebellions, all brutally suppresed. Perhaps internet fame brought low-intensity warfare instead of open repression. Life on the bloody border of the Gap!

My preferred readings on the subject:

The more or less local view scholars with first hand knowledge of the area:

Mayan Visions : The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization
by June C. Nash
F1435.3.P7 N37 2001
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415928621/qid=1047644387/sr=1 - 1/ref=sr_1_1/103-9794486-3603062?v=glance&s=books

Rebellion in Chiapas: Rural Reforms, Campesino Radicalism and the Limits to Salinismo
by Neil Harvey
[on order]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1878367234/qid%3D1047644721/sr%3D11-1 /ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-9794486-3603062

Also the 1992 document you found on the web by the Sub ("two winds" or something like that)

George has neverly knowingly seen a Zapatista but there is good background information in:
Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion: Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas
by George Collier (Editor), Peter Rosset, Elizabeth Quaratiello (Contributor)
HD1531.M6 C65 1994
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/093502865X/ref=pd_sim_books_5/ 103-9794486-3603062?v=glance&s=books

For the more "global" journalistic view:
The Zapatista Reader
by Tom Hayden (Editor)
F1256 .Z269 2002
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560253355/qid=1047644973/sr=1 - 3/ref=sr_1_3/103-9794486-3603062?v=glance&s=books

Also supposed to be good but I haven't read:

The War Against Oblivion: Zapatista Chronicles 1994 - 2000 (The Read & Resist Series)
by John Ross
[on order]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1567511740/ref=pd_sim_books_2/ 103-9794486-3603062?v=glance&s=books

Zapata Lives!: Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico
by Lynn Stephen
F1256 .S84 2002
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520230523/ref=pd_sim_books_2/ 103-9794486-3603062?v=glance&s=books

A digression on meat packing:

"Slaughterhouse Sweatshops": Organizing for Justice in Nebraska’s Meatpacking Industry by Linda M. Kalbach

On the Kill Floor: U.S. Slaughterhouse Conditions"

At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die: Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race By CHARLIE LeDUFF

Working Conditions in American Slaughterhouses: Worse than You Thought Author finds new meat 'Jungle' in High Plains By Timothy Gardner

extract from Upton Sinclair The Jungle

Mexican immigrants face new set of fears New York Times October 15, 2001 By Sam Dillon

Beardstown jobs attract Hispanics: Growth is attributed to Excel Corp. pork plant, which employs about 1,800 workers March 16, 2001 By LISA KERNEK

Illegal Labor Common in Meat Industry

Feds Say Tyson Paid for Smuggled Workers

Tyson Foods immigrant smuggling trial

Poultry pay puts fast food giant in dock: US chicken supplier on trial for importing illegal workers (The Guardian)

At the end of the investigation, six former managers at Tyson's plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, were charged. One, Jimmy Rowland, a personnel manager, has committed suicide and two others have pleaded guilty and have agreed to give evidence against the company. The other three managers face trial along with the company.

If convicted, Tyson would face hefty fines and could also lose some of its lucrative government contracts.

Tyson's position is that the illegal hiring was carried out by "rogue" managers who have since been fired. "There is no evidence of corporate effort to hire undocumented workers," said a spokesman.

...Although John Tyson was killed in a 1967 car accident, the family company continued to thrive and started supplying McDonald's with McNuggets - a concoction of reconstituted chicken made from a new breed of fowl with unusually large breasts, added to stabilisers and breads.

Thinking Small: Globalization and the Choice of Technology by Kumar Venkat (from oriononline.org)

Biopiracies and other appropriations...

BIO-PATENTS: INDIGENOUS PERSON FROM PAPUA NEW GUINEA CLAIMED IN US GOVERNMENT PATENT (patent 5,397,696 ) --and cf Replace Biopiracy with Biodemocracy (Andrew Kimbrell), The Genetic Archaeology of Race (Steve Olson)

bioprospecting and biopiracy in the eyes of google

Anderson. 2002. On Maya Medicine and the Biomedical Gaze. Current Anthropology 43: 789-793 Go to: Full Text (frames) | PDF File(52kb) 2 0.80

Atran et al.. 2002. Folkecology, Cultural Epidemiology, and the Commons Spirit. Current Anthropology 43: 421-450 Go to: Full Text (frames) | PDF File (524kb)

Nigh. 2002. Maya Medicine in the Biological Gaze. Current Anthropology 43: 451-477 Go to: Full Text (frames) | PDF File (219kb)

16 March
The Emperor's Clothes ...seems to be a Hans Christian Andersen tale, one version of which is here, but there's a collection of tales of Aarne-Thompson type 1620 which says that "Andersen's source was a Spanish story recorded by Don Juan Manuel (1282-1348)" --part of D.L. Ashliman's Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts It would be very interesting to know who has studied the appearances and appropriations of the "new clothes" trope. The Emperor's New Clothes (Archer Taylor Modern Philology, Vol. 25, No. 1. (Aug., 1927), pp. 17-27) is one treatment.

Swine flu and other epidemiological wonderments:

Chasing the Fickle Swine Flu (Bernice Wuethrich in Science Volume 299, Number 5612, Issue of 7 Mar 2003, pp. 1502-1505) and sidebar An Avian Flu Jumps to People :

It seems that after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fast track, churning out variants every year. Changes in animal husbandry, including increased vaccination, may be spurring this evolutionary surge... For North American pigs, the environment has recently changed dramatically in two ways: herd size and vaccination practices... In less than a decade, vaccination has become the norm for breeding sows, which in turn pass their maternal antibodies on to their progeny. In 1995, swine flu vaccination was so new that the National Swine Survey conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture didn't bother to assess its extent. In 2000, the same survey showed that 44.1% of breeding females received a vaccine. Today, more than half of all sows are vaccinated against both H1N1 and H3N2 viruses... Widespread vaccination may actually be selecting for new viral types. If vaccination develops populations with uniform immunity to certain virus genotypes, say H1N1 and H3N2, then other viral mutants would be favored.

--cf A Molecular Whodunit (Robert G. Webster in Science Volume 293, Number 5536, Issue of 7 Sep 2001, pp. 1773-1775) and Molecular Basis for High Virulence of Hong Kong H5N1 Influenza A Viruses (Masato Hatta et al in Science Volume 293, Number 5536, Issue of 7 Sep 2001, pp. 1840-1842) and The Origin and Control of Pandemic Influenza (Graeme Laver and Elspeth Garman in Science Volume 293, Number 5536, Issue of 7 Sep 2001, pp. 1776-1777). Also Infectious History (Joshua Lederberg in Science Volume 288, Number 5464, Issue of 14 Apr 2000, pp. 287-293) and Do Chronic Diseases Have an Infectious Root? (Carl Zimmer in Science Volume 293, Number 5537, Issue of 14 Sep 2001, pp. 1974-1977)

and Shortage of Meningitis Vaccine Forces Triage in Burkina Faso (Gretchen Vogel in Science Volume 299, Number 5612, Issue of 7 Mar 2003, pp. 1499-1501) --cf BACTERIAL MENINGITIS: Appeal to Thwart Deadly Outbreak (Gretchen Vogel in Science Volume 298, Number 5592, Issue of 11 Oct 2002, p. 339) and Simple Rules with Complex Dynamics (Sir Robert May in Science Volume 287, Number 5453, Issue of 28 Jan 2000, pp. 601-602)

"Secular trend" is another of those terms one needs to explicate. Here's the OED entry, from 'secular':

8. Econ. and Statistics. Of a fluctuation or trend: occurring or persisting over an unlimited period; not periodic or short-term.

1895 A. Marshall Princ. Econ. (ed. 3) I. v. v. 470 There are secular movements of normal price, caused by the gradual growth of knowledge, of population and of capital, and the changing conditions of demand and supply from one generation to another.

1926 L. D. Edie Econ. II. iv. 49 Economic fluctuations fall into four major types: seasonal, secular, cyclical, and residual.

1971 H. S. Shryock et al. Methods & Materials Demography II. xiii. 377/2 If the observations are made at different times of the year, seasonal movements may also be apparent. When we are trying to describe the growth of a population over a relatively longer period of time (for example, India from 1872 to 1961) we are generally interested in the secular trend only.

1973 Daily Tel. 15 Jan. 17/6 This is the first time the Government has had to pay so much for money but the secular trend of interest rates will stop rising only if the rate of inflation is brought down.

1976 Sci. Amer. Sept. 107/1 The secular trend of workers migrating out of agricultural jobs as a result of technological change in agriculture has recently slackened.

17 March
Montes Azules "Stop the Forced Displacement of Indigenous Communities in Chiapas, Mexico"

Hardt & Negri Empire (a LOT of the text...) ...also at gnutenberg.net (also as empire.pdf)

how Cheney got rich ...see also State Terrorism Contracts for Halliburton and The Candidate From Brown and Root: Bush Doesn't Know Dick By Robert Bryce, Austin Chronicle 2000 and In Tough Times, a Company Finds Profits in Terror War By JEFF GERTH and DON VAN NATTA Jr., NY Times 2002

(these images surely subject to copyright)

"...captains of American industry deciding to save capitalism by expanding the American sphere of influence. The rest is rhetoric...." (ERB)

Iraq: A Decade of Devastation (Middle East Report 215, Summer 2000) "And They Called It Peace" US Policy on Iraq Phyllis Bennis

from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/tacitus-agricola.html:

30. “Whenever I consider the origin of this war and the necessities of our position, I have a sure confidence that this day, and this union of yours, will be the beginning of freedom to the whole of Britain. To all of us slavery is a thing unknown; there are no lands beyond us, and even the sea is not safe, menaced as we are by a Roman fleet. And thus in war and battle, in which the brave find glory, even the coward will find safety. Former contests, in which, with varying fortune, the Romans were resisted, still left in us a last hope of succour, inasmuch as being the most renowned nation of Britain, dwelling in the very heart of the country, and out of sight of the shores of the conquered, we could keep even our eyes unpolluted by the contagion of slavery. To us who dwell on the uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom, this remote sanctuary of Britain’s glory has up to this time been a defence. Now, however, the furthest limits of Britain are thrown open, and the unknown always passes for the marvellous. But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.
(Ancient History Sourcebook: Tacitus: Life of Cnaeus Julius Agricola, c.98 CE, Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb)

From FOSblog:

Sunday, March 16, 2003
Escalating the copyright rhetoric ....On Thursday a group of copyright industry executives testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. Joining them was John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general, who offered this syllogism to the subcommittee. Much copyright infringement can be traced to organized crime. Organized crime syndicates engage in many kinds of wrongdoing, "including supporting terrorist activities". Therefore, "[a]ll components of the Justice Department...will do everything within their power to make sure that intellectual property piracy does not become a vehicle for financing or supporting acts of terror." (PS: There are two intersecting lines of hysteria here. First, every hot crime must be shoehorned into the category of terrorism in order to justify expanded surveillance and heightened sanctions. Second, copyright infringement must be inflated to the most serious offense that the public test of ridicule will allow. The analogy to pillaging ships worked for a while, but the Justice Department now perceives an opportunity for ratcheting up.)

review of Brenner's The Boom and the Bubble (Walden Bello in The Nation, 21 Oct 2002)

Environmental Security database, and Security and the Environment: An Annotated Bibliography

UNDERSTANDING CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS: GEOPOLITICS AND RISK SOCIETY Gearóid Ó Tuathail ...and see The Postmodern Geopolitical Condition: States, Statecraft, and Security at the Millennium, and his page, with links

A Critical Geopolitics of Global Governance Simon Dalby ...and Calling 911: Geopolitics, Security and America's New War

The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism M. Kearney Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24. (1995), pp. 547-565.

The Mexican-Us Border: The Making of an Anthropology of Borderlands Robert R. Alvarez, Jr. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24. (1995), pp. 447-470.

MIGRANT "ILLEGALITY" AND DEPORTABILITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE Nicholas P. De Genova Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2002. 31:419-447.

BIODIVERSITY PROSPECTING: Lessons and Prospects Katy Moran,1 Steven R. King,2 and Thomas J. Carlson3 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2001. 30:505-526.

A Mythic Perspective of Commodification on the World Wide Web by Glendal P. Robinson

Social Fear and the Commodification of Terrorism Joe Lockard Bad Subjects, Issue # 59 , February 2002

GM Crops: Globalisation and commodification (Nuffield Council on Bioethics)

3.68 Recent international trading agreements, intended to liberalise the movement of goods within and between the major trading blocks, have supported the so-called globalisation of the food chain as well as the trend towards commodification. Commodification means that crop products are traded on international markets on the basis of the expectation of future fluctuations in supply and demand, regardless of provenance or the local value systems of the farmers and societies that produced them. (44) Despite this trend, we may expect to see an increased demand for GM crop products to be segregated or traceable. While segregation is required or desirable this may help to suspend the impact of commodification.

Water Incorporated; The Commodification Of The World's Water By Maude Barlow Earth Island Journal March 5, 2002 --see also Blue Gold: The global water crisis and the commodification of the world's water supply A Special Report issued by the International Forum on Globalization (IFG)

Commodification from NYU Wiki (information Law Institute)

The Commodification of Bioinformation: The Icelandic Health Sector Database Hilary Rose

Tracking Commodification from New Economic Formations (Landscapes of Global Capital, St Lawrence University)

Commodification: Kyoto threatens, WSF inspires resistance By Patrick Bond (a South African perspective)

The surgical counter-attack from the international left which impressed me most last month at Porto Alegre, was bullshit detection in relation to two Kyoto deals: the 1997 Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; and the upcoming World Water Forum.

Next month, the UN and World Bank go to Japan in search of an impossible consensus between multinational corporations, neoliberal state officials and water-sector activists. I'll devote my March column to multiple water wars which reveal how the progressive international eco-social movement weighs up responsibilities and opportunities.

18 March
Time to get together some datasets for GIS purposes. I'm not sure just how to use some of these, how to get them into ArcGIS if we want to, but for the moment I'll concentrate on finding them.

UNEP/GRID Africa, Asia, Latin America, Global (including images of pop density, 1960/70/80/90 and 2000 for some).

R:/global/africa/adminunits.mxd is a basemap for Africa, with addition of pop density .tif for 1990. There's a snapshot at http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/nigh/af90pop.gif

The process is interesting: once the basemap is downloaded as .e00, use ArcCatalog and ArcToolbox to extract it. Then the .tif files will fit nicely.

For Latin America, I've grabbed a BIL for 2000. The BIL is immediately importable, but has to be recolored

UNEP/Arendal Maps and Graphics and UNEP Geneva too, and Socio-Economic Portal for UNEP. Gridded Population downloads

/global/15min/all15min.mxd is http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/nigh/globalpop.jpg

World Bank map server

Broad spectrum of reviews of Hardt & Negri, including one by Gopal Balakrishanan (New Left Review)

Hardt and Negri open their case by arguing that, although nation-state-based systems of power are rapidly unravelling in the force-fields of world capitalism, globalization cannot be understood as a simple process of de-regulating markets. Far from withering away, regulations today proliferate and interlock to form an acephelous supranational order which the authors choose to call ‘Empire’. The term, as they use it, refers not to a system in which tribute flows from peripheries to great capital cities, but to a more Foucauldian figure—a diffuse, anonymous network of all-englobing power. Hardt and Negri claim that the sinews of this phantasmic polity—its flows of people, information, and wealth—are simply too unruly to be monitored from metropolitan control centres. Their account of its origins adds a few striking nuances to a now familiar story. An older, statist world of ruling class and proletariat, of dominant core and subject periphery, is breaking down, and in its place a less dichotomous and more intricate pattern of inequality is emerging. ‘Empire’ could be described as the planetary Gestalt of these flows and hierarchies. The logic of this volatile totality evades and transgresses all the inherited divisions of political thought: state and society, war and peace, control and freedom, core and periphery; even the distinction between systemic and anti-systemic agency is blurred beyond recognition. The advent of this Empire is thus not merely a momentous episode in world history, it is an event of considerable ontological importance, heralded here in the voice of impassioned prophecy.

...For just because Empire is a media-steered system of political publicity, it is permanently vulnerable to the impact of destabilizing, marginal events that slip out of the control of those who manufacture consent. Empire is a society of the spectacle, seemingly powered by the pursuit of happiness—but in reality based on the mobilization of desires that are intimately wedded to the fear of failure, exclusion and loneliness...

You get such a different perspective if you ask about globalisation...

Some more water stuff:

GIS Viewer: California dams

US aquifers
/global/dams/usdams.mxd
/global/northamerica/aquifers.mxd

National Atlas map layers warehouse

and list of themes

US lights /global/northamerica/uslights.mxd

Cadillac Desert home page (PBS)

Cadillac Desert Revisited: Property Rights, Public Policy, and Water-Resource Depletion (Stephen P. Holland and Michael R. Moore)

and not to forget:

AUTHOR DeBuys, William Eno.
TITLE Salt dreams : land & water in low-down California / William deBuys ; photographs by Joan Myers. 
IMPRINT Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, c1999. 
CALL NO. GE155.S35 D4 1999.
and
AUTHOR Worster, Donald, 1941- 
TITLE Rivers of empire : water, aridity, and the growth of the American West / Donald Worster. 
IMPRINT New York : Pantheon Books, 1986. 
CALL NO. HC107.A17 W67 1986. 

AUTHOR       Dekmejian, R. Hrair, 1933-
TITLE        Troubled waters : the geopolitics of the Caspian Region 
IMPRINT      London : I.B. Tauris, 2001.
CALL NO.     DK511.C07 D45 2001.

TITLE        The geopolitics of energy into the 21st century / a report of the
               CSIS Strategic Energy Initiative ; project cochairs, Sam Nunn, 
               James R. Schlesinger ; project director, Robert E. Ebel.
IMPRINT      Washington, D.C. : CSIS Press, c2000.
CONTENTS     Vol. 1. An overview and policy considerations. -- Vol. 2. The 
               supply-demand outlook, 2000-2020. -- Vol. 3. The geopolitical 
               outlook, 2000-2020.
CALL NO.     HD9502.A2 G465 2000.

AUTHOR       Held, Colbert C.
TITLE        Middle East patterns : places, peoples, and politics 
IMPRINT      Boulder, CO : Westview Press, 2000.
CALL NO.     DS44 .H418 2000.

TITLE        A road map to war : territorial dimensions of international 
               conflict / edited by Paul F. Diehl.
IMPRINT      Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.
CALL NO.     JZ1242 .R63 1999.

TITLE        Boundaries, territory and postmodernity / edited by David Newman.
IMPRINT      London ; Portland, OR : F. Cass, 1999.
CALL NO.     JC319 .B68 1999.

TITLE        Oil and geopolitics in the Caspian Sea Region 
IMPRINT      Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 1999.
CALL NO.     HD9576.C372 O36 1999.

AUTHOR       Scott, Allen John.
TITLE        Regions and the world economy : the coming shape of global 
               production, competition, and political order / Allen J. Scott.
IMPRINT      Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1998.
CALL NO.     HF1025 .S364 1998.

TITLE        Contrasts and solutions in the Caucasus 
IMPRINT      Aarhus ; Oakville, Ct. : Aarhus Univ. Press, 1998.
CALL NO.     DK511.C2 C66 1998.

AUTHOR       Kemp, Geoffrey.
TITLE        Strategic geography and the changing Middle East 
IMPRINT      Washington, D.C. : Brookings Institution Press, 1997.
CALL NO.     DS63.1 .K44 1997.

AUTHOR       Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1928-
TITLE        The grand chessboard : American primacy and its geostrategic 
               imperatives / Zbigniew Brzezinski.
IMPRINT      New York : BasicBooks, c1997.
CALL NO.     E840 .B785 1997.

AUTHOR       Perkins, John H.
TITLE        Geopolitics and the green revolution : wheat, genes, and the cold  war .
IMPRINT      New York : Oxford University Press, 1997.
CALL NO.     SB191.W5 P42 1997.

Middle East (/global/westasia/mideast.mxd)

19 March
Water Supply as subject in Annie

International Water Events Database

Atlas of International Freshwater Agreements (stashed at http://acadprojwww.wlu.edu/vol4/BlackmerH/public_html/mypdfs/freshwater/ ) and International Freshwater Treaties Database

World Commission on Dams and Table of contents and downloadable files for Dams and Development, The Report of the World Commission on Dams. See also UNEP Dams & Development Project and Focal Dams / River Basin Case Studies and thematic review papers "...informed the WCD final report by providing in-depth examinations of dam-related issues"

Nepal ...and see Aquastat for Nepal (and see Aquastat home

AQUASTAT is FAO's global information system of water and agriculture developed by the Land and Water Development Division of FAO. The objective of AQUASTAT is to provide users with comprehensive information on the state of agricultural water management across the world, with emphasis on developing countries and countries in transition.

Snagged Global Map of Irrigated Areas from FAO site, and converted it to a grid ... at /global/irrig/gmia.mxd

Siltation analysis in the Neyyar reservoir and forest degradation ... (Kerala)

After watching CAdillac Desert:

Selenium Contamination Research at Kesterson NWR, CA
Kesterson: a Microcosm of Government Corruption

The enclosed position paper responds to a petition submitted to the California State Water Resources Control Board regarding regulation of discharge from farm field drains in the Grasslands area on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley in Merced County.
The petition requests the Board to stop the discharge and cut off irrigation water to farms as a way to protect "public trust resources" from destruction.
I find the petition consistent with past environmental socialist fear-mongering to win voter support for constraints on federal Central Valley Project (CVP) water deliveries and drainage relief for farms.
My response attempts to discredit allegations in the petition and help revise public understanding of the Kesterson debacle.

Wetlands Clean Selenium From Agricultural Runoff

Bureau of Reclamation and Water Supply Information within Reclamation

20 March
Yesterday Jim Kahn sent a message including the following: "Water resources is one of many things linked to global stewardship, it is not a comprehensive perspective on the importance of place to human activity." So I'm trying to gather up what the significance is, and Ron sent the text of an article by Tony Clarke on Water Wars, which mentions these organizations:

World Water Forum
World Water Council
Global Water Partnership ...and 3rd World Water Forum

AUTHOR Barlow, Maude. 
TITLE Blue gold : the fight to stop the corporate theft of the world's water / Maude Barlow, Tony Clarke. 
IMPRINT New York : New Press : distributed by W.W. Norton, c2002. 
CALL NO. HD1691 .B37 2002. 

Until the last decade, the study of fresh water was left to highly specialized groups of experts --hydrologists, engineers, scientists, city planners, weather forecasters, and others with a niche interest in what so many of us took for granted. Now, however, an increasing number of voices... are sounding the alarm: the global fresh water crisis looms as perhaps the greatest threat ever to the survival of our planet.

Tragically, this global call for action comes in an era guided by the principles of the so-called "Washington Consensus," a model of economics rooted in the belief that liberal market economics constitute the one and only economic choice for the whole world. Key to this "consensus" is the commodification of "the commons." Everything is for sale, even those areas of life, such as social services and natural resources, that were once considered the common heritage of humanity. Governments around the world are abdicating their responsibility to protect the natural resources within their borders, giving authority away to private companies that make a business of resource exploitation.

Faced with the now well-documented fresh water crisis, governments and international institutions are advocating a "Washington Consensus" solution: the privatization and commodification of water. Price water, they say in chorus; put it up for sale and let the market determine its future... (xii)

...a handful of transnational corporations, backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are now aggressively taking over the management of public water services, dramatically raising the price of water to the local residents... the decline in fresh water supplies and standards has created a wonderful venture opportunity for water corporations and their investors... The agenda is clear: water should be treated like any other tradeable good, its use and distribution determined by the principles of profit... (xiii)

Middle Eastern hydropolitics: interpreting constructed knowledge Tony Allan (6 books summarized)

Hydropolitics in Post–Soviet Central Asia: International Environmental Institutions and Water Resource Control H. L. Carlisle

Nile Imperatives: Avenues Toward A Win-Win Situation By Dr Kinfe Abraham

Cochabamba and water in Google

On the "Washington Consensus"

What Should the World Bank Think about the Washington Consensus? (John Williamson, coiner of the term) --see commentary by Ravi Kanbur
Fads and Fashion in Economic Reforms: Washington Consensus or Washington Confusion? By Moises Naim Editor Foreign Policy Magazine October 26, 1999
Neither the Washington Nor the Post-Washington Consensus (Ben Fine)

Washington Contentious: Economic Policies for Social Equity in Latin America Findings of the Commission on Economic Reform in Unequal Latin American Societies (Nancy Birdsall and Augusto de la Torre with Rachel Menezes)

A bit of summing up, before going off for a weekend of hiking:

I'm aware of several BIG questions I'd like Global Stewardship to consider:

• How does the world work? (?how can we parse 'Global Order'? What's the range of ways to think about 'GO'? What are the concepts that various analysts use and discuss? How do political and economic forces constrain and channel action?)

• What are the trajectories of various systems? (Where are we in History? What's the range/pallette of ways of assessing?)

• What are the responsibilities, opportunities, and ranges of choices for actors?

Why water? --a base-level essential, a focus of social decisions, societal investments, a crux of civilizations, a transformer of landscapes and possibilities for human distribution, a Resource that's seemingly in play at present, with wide repercussions, a boundless source of illustrations of management, including short-sightedness and exemplars of how decisions are made. A locus of human folly. In another year it could be agribusiness, GMOs, bioprospecting... other examples of the consequences of decisions, especially resource allocation decisions.

?What do various disciplines contribute to our roster of ways to understand (a) what's happened to date AND (b) the range of choices available

Geopolitics: who are the actors? How is that evolving? Empire, Capitalism...

The logics and the consequences of Globalization, seen from multiple vantage points

21 March
It occurred to me that bifurcation might be what I'm experiencing. Wikipedia helps with the diagram. Maybe it's easier to consider the Trousers of Time: "When you make a choice, time bifurcates, like a pair of trousers, and you never get to find out what would have happened if you had gone down the other leg." (http://www10.brinkster.com/mshades/books/j/jingo.html). See also Chaos, Causality and Postmodern Philosophy of Science (T.R. Young) and How Social Change Can Happen (Jennie Moore)

A Risky Forest Policy in the Amazon? (letter and response, Science Volume 299, Number 5614, Issue of 21 Mar 2003, p. 1843)

Overkill and Sustainable Use Martyn Murray, Science Volume 299, Number 5614, Issue of 21 Mar 2003, pp. 1851-1853)

Conservationists wishing to reduce overkill are presented with two main options: make animals harder to market through restrictions in access, trade, and the use of modern technology, or provide resource users with a greater sense of ownership. The conservation community currently places much emphasis on granting exclusive rights to commercial harvesting, be it on private, state-owned, or common lands. The spiritual and knowledge-based dimensions of ownership are usually ignored. Possibly the spiritual relationship is seen as aboriginal and irrelevant to modern management, while the knowledge-based relationship is sidelined as academic and equally impertinent. When modern society does recognize these dimensions, it often employs them defensively: The inspiration from natural beauty is used to establish protected areas, and biological knowledge is used to set limits to the catch or bag. By contrast, the biological knowledge and spiritual understanding of the traditional hunter enhanced his sense of identity with the prey.

The role of indigenous peoples in sustaining wildlife resources is beginning to be recognized. In a few pioneering ventures, indigenous peoples have participated in the management of protected areas (23). There is room for much greater appreciation and wider incorporation of traditional beliefs, values, and knowledge in contemporary conservation and development. An ongoing exploration of these dimensions in the global context would also constructively broaden the current economic focus.

How Much Are Human Lives and Health Worth? Jocelyn Kaiser, Science Volume 299, Number 5614, Issue of 21 Mar 2003, pp. 1836-1837. and Wielding the Data-Quality Cudgel Jocelyn Kaiser Science Volume 299, Number 5614, Issue of 21 Mar 2003, p. 1837.

24 March
I asked the OED about 'dystopia' and got a cf to cacotopia (cites
1818 Bentham Parl. Ref. Catech. 73
As a match for Utopia (or the imagined seat of the best government), suppose a Cacotopia (or the imagined seat of the worst government) discovered and described.). [and cf Wikipedia, and Bentham's neologisms coll;ected]. In the quotations under 'dystopia', there's
1868 J. S. Mill in Hansard Commons 12 Mar. 1517/1 It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.

Another OED lookup: 'besetting' as in
1860 Trench Serm. Westm. Ab. xiii. 144 We have every one of us besetting sins..sins, that is, which more easily get advantage over us than others.

Crimes of War: what the public should know

Haaretz Daily

Water in History from de Villiers Water: the fate of our most precious resource

25 March
Got Gini index data from http://www.worldbank.org/research/growth/dddeisqu.htm (/nigh/gini/), but it's not directly useful for ArcGIS, being multi-year. The World Bank Inequality Data page has more datasets.

Downloaded POVCAL (/nigh/povcal/), instructions for which are at http://www.worldbank.org/lsms/tools/povcal/. It's a very DOSsy-looking tool, don't know if it's worth wrestling with.

Geographic Aspects of Inequality and Poverty

Where are the poor?: Experiences with the Development and Use of Poverty Maps (Norbert Henninger and Mathilde Snel)

Environment and Poverty Times issue #1 (August 2002) from UNEP/GRID Arendal. See on its first page an isoGDP map, most eloquent...

Some from ecogeobib

Climate, Water Navigability, and Economic Development Andrew D. Mellinger, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and John L. Gallup CID Working Paper no. 24, September 1999

The Geography of Poverty and Wealth Jeffrey D. Sachs, Andrew D. Mellinger, and John L. Gallup Scientific American March 2001 --see datasets in comma-delimited form... and in ArcGIS e00 form

Venables A.J. (2000): "The optimal location of capital", Venables A.J. (2000): "Cities and Trade: external trade and internal geography in developing economies". Background paper written for the 1999 World Development report "Entering the 21st Century", and Venables A.J. (2001): "Geography and International Inequalities: the impact of the technologies", Paper prepared for World Bank ABCDE: April.

Sachs J.D (2000): "Tropical underdevelopment" NBER Working Paper No. 8119 September 2, 2000.

Mapping and Geographic Analysis of Human Welfare and Poverty: Review and Assessment (Norbert Henninger, World Resources INstitute April 1998)

Mapping Indicators of Poverty in West Africa

Mapping Poverty and Livestock in the Developing World A report commissioned by the UK Department for International Development, on behalf of the Inter-Agency Group of Donors Supporting Research on Livestock Production and Health in the Developing World. P.K.Thornton, R.L.Kruska, N.Henninger, P.M.Kristjanson, R.S.Reid, F.Atieno, A.N.Odero and T.Ndegwa. International Livestock Research Institute. 2002.

Geospatial Dimensions of Poverty and Food Security: Mexico ("largest inequality" of "any country in the world"?)

Latin America and the Caribbean "The assessment report of the state, problems and trends concerning to the region. Published in 2000, it covers eight key thematic areas, asseses the efectiveness of existing environmental and related policies, and provides feasible recommendations for the future"

Freshwater from UNEP/GRID-Arendal

About one-third of the world's population lives in countries with moderate to high water stress. The problems are most acute in Africa and West Asia but lack of water is already a major constraint to industrial and socio-economic growth in many other areas, including China, India and Indonesia. If present consumption patterns continue, two out of every three persons on Earth will live in water-stressed conditions by the year 2025. The declining state of the world's freshwater resources, in terms of quantity and quality, may prove to be the dominant issue on the environment and development agenda of the coming century.

UN Division for Sustainable Development on Freshwater, viz. National Reports on Freshwater

GEMS/Water

The GEMS/Water Programme provides authoritative, scientifically-sound information on the state and trends of global inland water quality required as a basis for the sustainable management of the world's freshwater to support global environmental assessments and decision- making processes... More than 100 countries participate in GEMS/Water, providing in excess of 2 million data entries. Data records range from 1977 to the present.

Agnew's trenchant summary:

Third on the list of models is that of the 'hierarchical network'. This is the spatial structure of a world economy in which cores, peripheries, and semi-peripheries are linked together by flows of goods, people, and investment. Transactions based largely on market exchange produce patterns of uneven development as flows move wealth through networks of trade and communication producing regional concentrations of wealth and poverty. At the local scale, particularly that of urban centres, hinterlands are drawn into connection with a larger world which has become progressively more planetary in geographical scope over the last five hundred years. Political power is a function of where in the hierarchy of sites from global centres to rural peripheries a place is located. Time is organized by the geographical scope and temporal rhythm of financial and economic transactions. The spatiality is that of spatial networks joining together a hirearchy of nodes and areas which are connected by flows of people, goods, capital and information... Since 1945, the hierarchical-network model has become more and more central to the distribution of political power as a result of the increased penetration of state territories by , population, and investment flows... (Millennium 28:506, 507)

AME Mineral Economics "offers detailed economics and technical knowledge on the metals, mining and energy sectors" and includes details on large mining operations (and smelters, etc.) worldwide

BRUTALITY AND BRAZIL The Human Cost of Cheap Steel By Dave Treece

Mines and Communities Website --see countries for news stories

Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption, And the Third World's Environmental Legacy by Patricia Adams

We've all heard of the Third World's debt crisis, of hopelessly poor nations unable to pay their debts, and of the human suffering and environmental consequences of their desperate predicament. Amid emotional calls from some to forgive the debt outright come the sober solutions from bankers and bureaucrats, with their seemingly unending stream of Brady and Baker Plans, and bewildering variants of them.

Yet despite the raging world-wide controversy over the Third World's debt, no one has posed these most elementary questions: who lent what and to whom, where did the money go, what did it do there, and where is it now.

In this brilliant hybrid of detective work and policy analysis, Patricia Adams has unraveled a rats' nest of Third World lending to describe the debt crisis in its startling simplicity. Her conclusions are equally startling — not what many might have expected from a prominent environmentalist heading an outspoken advocacy organization.

Through a straightforward exposition of the facts, you will come to see the debt for what it is — the sum total of thousands of loans, some illegitimate, justifying repudiation, others legitimate, meriting repayment. Surprisingly, you will learn that the Third World's environment — so ravaged through decades of degradation — has often been spared by virtue of the debt. And that legal mechanisms — first used by the U.S. to repudiate Cuban debts after the Spanish-American War — are in place to resolve the debt crisis far more equitably than political solutions cooked up in Washington and the capitals of Third World countries. Odious debts are well established in international law; through this doctrine Chase Manhattan, the World Bank, and other lenders would collect on their debts — not from the people of the Third World but from the Marcoses and Mobutus who would be liable.

Patricia Adams is an economist and the author of In the Name of Progress: The Underside of Foreign Aid. She lives in Toronto and is the Executive Director of Probe International, a think-tank concerned with Third World aid and trade policies.

Rethinking the Semi-Periphery: Some Conceptual Issues (Karine Peschard)

Neo-liberal Globalism and its challengers: Sustainability in the semi-periphery (see Milestone Report)

The Globalism and its challengers project responds critically to the last 20 years of neo-liberal globalism. Researchers come from a diversity of perspectives and disciplines. All are critics of neo-liberal globalism and share the view that transnational capital has escaped democratic accountability and must be brought under citizen control.

We explore this possibility from the viewpoint of four countries on the semi-periphery of global power - Canada, Australia, Norway, and Mexico. The condition of semi-peripherality, whether defined primarily as social, cultural, economic or spatial, can be understood as having both the consciousness of subordination and the means of resistance - unlike the core which may lack the consciousness, and the periphery which may lack the required means. The contradictory position of the semi-periphery is a provocative environment from which to study both the dynamics of closer global integration and resistance to globalism.

The Cornerhouse (a variety of briefings and papers: "The Corner House aims to support the growth of a vibrant, democratic, equitable and non-discriminatory civil society in which communities have control over the resources and decisions which affect their lives and means of livelihood, and have the right to define themselves rather than being defined by others. You can contact us at the following address."

Suppression of dissent Documents and contacts "This site deals with attacks on dissenting views and individuals. The general field of "suppression of dissent" includes whistleblowing, free speech, systems of social control and related topics. The purpose of the site is to foster examination of these issues and action against suppression. It is founded on the assumption that openness and dialogue should be fostered to challenge unaccountable power."

Science, Technology and Innovation at Harvard

The aim of this activity is to undertake research, conduct training, provide policy advice and disseminate information on the role of science, technology and innovation in economic growth in developing countries. It stresses the importance of integrating environmental considerations into economic growth and adjusting institutions to reflect the needs of sustainable development. It focuses on how to mobilize the world’s scientific and technical knowledge to solve global development challenges. Specific subactivities under STI include biotechnology and globalization, agricultural productivity in the tropics, environmentally sound and small-scale technologies, public perception of new technologies, technical education, and science and technology advice. The activity is a joint effort of the Center for International Development at Harvard University and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. It is implemented in cooperation with the Program in Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Journal of World-Systems Research Special issue(s) on Global Inequality

Information, Finance, and the New International Inequality: The Case of Coffee (John Talbot) and Global Energy Inequalities: Exploring the Long-Term Implications (Bruce Podobnik)

Special Issue on Globalization (1999)

most recent issue

26 March
Bechtel:

"In the spring of 2000, impoverished residents in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba protested after a company partially owned by Bechtel as much as tripled residents' water bills. A 17-year-old boy was shot and killed in the protesting that ensued, and Bechtel pulled out of Bolivia in April 2000. The company is now suing the Bolivian government for $25 million to compensate for the loss of future profits and the assets it was forced to leave behind."

(extract from a story in San Jose Mercury News Posted on Tue, Mar. 25, 2003

Bechtel to get richer in post-war Iraq
S.F. FIRM ONE OF SIX BIDDERS FOR CONTRACTS; CRITICS CRY FOUL
By Aaron Davis and Dana Hull

BECHTEL VS. BOLIVIA: COCHABAMBA’S WATER BILLS FROM BECHTEL --part of the Bolivian Water Revolt

Bolivia - Battle on Water in Cochabamba guerra del agua en Cochabamba ...and WATER: A BASIC RIGHT FOR EVERYONE Por Oscar Olivera, Marcela Olivera

Public Citizen on Cochabamba and Water Privatization Case Study: Cochabamba, Bolivia

(...and plenty more at google)

War is the Health of the State and The War and the Intellectuals (Randolph Bourne, 1918) (see more on him, and still more ...and google search How did I miss this?

Can We Discern the Effect of Globalization on Income Distribution? Evidence from Household Budget Surveys (Branko Milanovic) --and see other Working Papers from World Bank

From : The New York Review of Books April 10, 2003 America and the World By Tony Judt (Review of: by Robert Kagan, The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century by Michael Mandelbaum, and two other books:

Mandelbaum has little tolerance for the clichés of "globalization." We don't live in a post-sovereign age, he insists. On the contrary: "The three components of Woodrow Wilson's vision— democracy, free markets, and peace—may be understood as public goods in that an effective state is needed to establish each of them." The world of the post–cold war era, like the world of the cold war, is a world of sovereign states, and only the traditional state can effectively act as the agent of its own and its citizens' interests. The greatest of all sovereign states—the US—happens also to be the country that has done most to promote and benefit from democracy and free markets. The interests and responsibilities of American foreign policy thus remain intimately bound up with those of other similarly disposed states.

Unlike Kagan, therefore, Mandelbaum appreciates the significance of Europeans' "invention of peace," as he puts it, and emphasizes the shared interest of America and Europe in the common security arrangements so carefully put in place in recent decades. Cooperation brings strength, not weakness. Present tiffs across the Atlantic should not distract us from the benefits that Europeans, Americans, and everyone else glean from the joint pursuit of shared interests. Peace, markets, and democracy, Mandelbaum concludes, are about as good as it gets. In any case, the alternatives are not merely worse; after our recent experience they are surely unthinkable.

But that is just the problem. Influential people in Washington are indeed, once again, thinking "the unthinkable." The Bush administration is breaking away from the very system of international relations that Mandelbaum posits as the shape of the coming century; and in influential circles around President George W. Bush peace is becoming, as we have seen in Robert Kagan's writing, a term of near abuse. Why is this happening?

...

Things can go wrong very fast, even and perhaps especially for an over-reaching great power. Like the German planners of 1914, today's Washington strategists are obsessed with challenges, timetables, windows of opportunity—and the eschatological urge to tear down a frustrating international order and remake it in their image. They, too, have exaggerated the threats and underestimated the risks. That is as far as the analogy goes—Imperial Germany and Republican America have little else in common. But hubris is not a shortcoming peculiar to any one constitutional form; and the inability to envisage nemesis is modern America's distinctive failing.

To be sure, things can go right, too, and the twenty-first century may yet belong to America. But just now, as Zhou Enlai is reported to have replied when asked what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell. In the meantime, as they are about to go to war, our leaders are betting the farm on the dream of a world that will for the foreseeable future perform America's bidding on nonnegotiable American terms. When, at the dawn of the American age, George Kennan urged that the US contain the Soviet challenge, he added: "It is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward 'toughness.'" Fifty-six years on, his advice goes unheeded. It is a bad sign.

I'm listening to patriotic rendering of the Star Spangled Banner for President Bush at McDill AFB and wondering to myself how many people realize it's a hymn about people fighting off foreign aggression written by a person who watched his city survive intensive bombing.
http://prorev.com/indexa.htm

$75 Billion just for the first phase of the war - that's $3,000 (a fortune) for every Iraqi man, woman and child. Think of what could have been done with that money.
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/

27 March
Some extracts, for good or ill, from the OED on stewardship:

1862 Goulburn Pers. Relig. i. iv. (1871) 41 Each one of us has a stewardship somewhere in the great social system.

2. a. Conduct of the office of steward; administration, management, control...
b. Eccl. The responsible use of resources, esp. money, time, and talents, in the service of God; spec. the organized pledging of specific amounts of money etc. to be given regularly to the Church. Also attrib.
...1938 H. Gerlinger Money Raising vi. 98 This lack of development of a social consciousness on the part of students is clearly due to the fact that practically no systematic effort is made to implant the idea of stewardship in undergraduates.
...1959 Christian Stewardship of Money i. 5 The movement..has broadened out into an attempt to recover and to teach the principles of the right Christian attitude towards the use of money. For want of a less archaic word this attitude is called `Stewardship'.

...there is no ground for the assumption that sti(asg)weard originally meant `keeper of the pig-sties'

1. a. An official who controls the domestic affairs of a household, supervising the service of his master's table, directing the domestics, and regulating household expenditure; a major-domo. Obs. exc. Hist.
...d. An officer in a ship who, under the direction of the captain or the purser, keeps the stores and arranges for the serving of meals; now applied to any attendant who waits upon the passengers, often with defining word indicating rank or special function, as bath-, cabin-, deck-, table-steward; captain's steward, chief steward, paymaster's steward, etc. In comic literature there are many allusions to the steward's function of attending to sea-sick passengers.
...5. a. One who manages the affairs of an estate on behalf of his employer.
...b. steward of the manor: one who transacts the financial and legal business of a manor on behalf of the lord; he holds the manor-court in the lord's absence, and keeps a copy of its rolls, whence the name steward of copyhold. steward of the leet, steward of the hundred, steward of the haven-court, an official with similar functions in the leet, hundred, and haven courts.
...6. fig. (From senses 1 and 5.) An administrator and dispenser of wealth, favours, etc.; esp. one regarded as the servant of God or of the people. Partly after Biblical uses, in which the word represents Gr. oikonomoj, L. dispensator.
...11. An overseer of workmen. In mod. use, the `underlooker' of a colliery, `who receives his orders from the manager, and to whom the overmen and deputies report upon the state of the mine' (Gresley Gloss. Coal-mining, 1883); also, in Scotland, the foreman of a workshop. Also occas. = shop steward

1 April
Abrupt Climate Change (R. B. Alley et al. Volume 299, Number 5615, Issue of 28 Mar 2003, pp. 2005-2010.)

Europe's Population at a Turning Point (Wolfgang Lutz et al. Science Volume 299, Number 5615, Issue of 28 Mar 2003, pp. 1991-1992.)

Europe's Population at a Turning Point
Europe has just entered a critical phase of its demographic evolution [HN1]. Around the year 2000, the population began to generate "negative momentum": a tendency to decline owing to shrinking cohorts of young people that was brought on by low fertility (birthrate) over the past three decades. Currently, the effect of negative momentum on future population is small. However, each additional decade that fertility remains at its present low level will imply a further decline in the European Union (EU) of 25 to 40 million people, in the absence of offsetting effects from immigration [HN2] or rising life expectancy. Governments in Europe are beginning to consider a range of policy options to address the negative implications of population decline and rapid aging (1, 2). Social policies and labor laws aimed at halting the further increase in the mean age of childbearing--which contributes to low fertility--have substantial scope for affecting future demographic trends. They also have an additional health rationale because of the increasing health risks associated with childbearing in older women.

ISI on Genetically Modified Crops

Integrated Risk Information System from EPA

2 April
The president's real goal in Iraq (Jay Bookman in Atlanta Journal Constitution, 29 Sept 2002)

Robert Cooper on the Postmodern State (The Observer, 7 April 2002)

St. Monday lyrics (Billy Bragg) --can be heard via amazon.com England-Half English --see also DOUGLAS REID who "specialises in the history of popular culture in Britain since 1700... His publications include essays and articles on: folk football, popular theatre, fairs and wakes as carnivalesque occasions, cock-fighting and bull-baiting, railway excursions, working hours and leisure cultures, and urban religion. His best known work is on the history of 'Saint Monday' "(in the journal Past & Present: "The Decline of Saint Monday, 1766-1876," Past and Present (71): 1976) ...and see also Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes by Thomas Wright, 1867 - Part 2 - Work and Play - Saint Monday : Its Worship and Worshippers

Deconstructing "Factory Discipline": Stiglitz, Stigler, Coase, Samuelson, Marshall, Marx, Senior ... and Clark by Mary Schweitzer Unpublished paper, copyright 1995 Mary McKinney Schweitzer

William Godwin from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

William Godwin (1756-1836) was the founder of philosophical anarchism. In his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) he argued that government is a corrupting force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, but that it will be rendered increasingly unnecessary and powerless by the gradual spread of knowledge. Politics will be displaced by an enlarged personal morality as truth conquers error and mind subordinates matter. In this development the rigorous exercise of private judgment, and its candid expression in public discussion, plays a central role, motivating his rejection of a wide range of co- operative and rule-governed practices which he regards as tending to mental enslavement, such as law, private property, marriage and concerts. Epitomising the optimism of events in France at the time he began writing, Godwin looked forward to a period in which the dominance of mind over matter would be so complete that mental perfectibility would take a physical form, allowing us to control illness and ageing and become immortal.

GENERAL VIEWS AS TO THE ALLEGED INCREASE OF MANKIND from Godwin, William. Of Population. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, Paternoster Row, 1820. See also Godwin's Summary of Principles ...he was, by the way, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley's father See also Wikipedia entry.

Manufacturing Wage Inequality in Mexico Jan. 1968-Jan.2001 from UTIP (grabbed UTIP UNIDO THEILS (UTIPUNIDO2001rv3.xls) 2001 ...has country codes) --UTIPineq.dbf (which I then joined successfully, and exported as unipineq.shp --but the table headings don't give the years)

3 April
Network Society Map (1997)

Mapping Cyberspace map gallery and Mapping the Network Society 1999 (Dodge and Kitchin)

Russia and the Network Society 1998 (Castells and Kiselyova)

Cyberatlas and recent update of Internet user stats

Lost in Cyberspace: A Cultural Geography of Cyberspace (Steve Mizrach)

Global digital divide gets wider (Nolan Fell)

The Geography of the New Economy Revised 2000 R. D. Norton, Bryant College

Mapping the Unmappable: Visual Representations of the Internet as Social Constructions (Adam B. King)

Mapping the Internet (Arman Danesh et al.)

cybergeography.org --see Atlas of Cyberspaces

Geography of Communications (links don't work...)

Cybermaps ("A collection of images charting cyberspace")

Internet Mapping Project: Map gallery ("The Internet has a diameter of about 10,000 pookies...") ...see mapping details and a movie of a layout

Global Internet Statistics by Language

CiteSeer 'Internet mapping' search

The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head (James F. Moore, Berkman Center for Internet & Society)

Trojanmice

Much change is of the ‘Trojan horse’ variety. At the top of the organisation a decision is taken to introduce a strategic change programme and consultants or an internal team are commissioned to plan it down to the very last detail. The planned changes are then presented at a grand event (the Trojan Horse) amid much loud music, bright lights and dry ice. More often than not, however, a few weeks later the organisation will have settled back into its usual ways and rejected much of the change. This is usually because the change was too great to be properly understood and owned by the workforce.

trojanmice, on the other hand, are small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way. They are small enough to be understood and owned by all concerned but their effects can be far-reaching. Collectively a few trojanmice will change more than one Trojan horse ever could.

There is an art to spotting a Trojan mouse - you need to develop a critically trained eye. Seeing things differently, and seeing different things, is a powerful experience. And once you do, you can set your trojanmice free to create the results your business needs.

Definitions re: nationalism, nation-state, etc.

Irredentism: An Inevitable Tendency of Ethnic Nationalism (DIMOSTENIS YAGCIOGLU) ("...an attempt to explore irredentism as a 'natural' inclination of ethnic nationalism, and its exacerbating impact on conflicts involving ethnic majorities and minorities")

Ethnic mapping

how not to represent population (Hungarians in Romania)

Africa: central

Croatia

Perry-Castaneda Map Collection at UT Austin

Mandara Mountains Homepage (Cameroon) --see interactive map

Cyberspace and Geographical Space issue of Geographical Review, 1997 --includes The Cyberspace "War of Ink and Internet" in Chiapas, Mexico (Oliver Froehling)

4 April
The Land Ethic Revisited: Ownership, Stewardship and Moral Responsibility in an Ecosystem (The Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values Seminar Theme 1999-2000 ) ...text of "The Land Ethic", and cf THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ALDO LEOPOLD'S "LAND ETHIC" By Ernest Partridge

...and thinking about muckrakers led me to some of the classics:

THE HISTORY OF THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY BY IDA M. TARBELL

The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) ...cf Cartoons of the Meat Trust Scandal of 1906 By Jim Zwick

6 April
I happened to look through my Human Geography 2001 log file and found a bunch of things that need to be followed up upon (I'm sure there are others --these seem particularly worthy of careful revisitation):

Food Balance accounting:  FAO overview ,  FAQ ,  China 1996

Anthropogenic change is a primary counterpoint to Human Geography. Science for 27 July has a group of articles on Ecology Through Time, including  Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems and a pointer to the Global Population Dynamics Database

The telesphere? noosphere

Networking in Developing Nations (see maps)

The night sky in the World (Satellite monitoring of the artificial night sky brightness and stellar visibility) --what does this actually measure? [mondo_ridotto0p25.gif and pdf of article with color maps]

Plants and population: Is there time?

BIOMAPS (Biodiversity Mapping for Protection and Sustainable Use of Natural Resources)

Demographic Links from University of Southampton

Office of Population Research at Princeton

International Data Base of US Census Bureau

The Global Trajectory (Richard A. Anthes Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 74, No. 6, 1993)

World Population: A Guide to the WWW (Richard Jensen)

Olson Ecosystem Complexes: ecosystems ranked by carbon in live vegetation (viewer)

Major World Ecosystem Complexes Ranked by Carbon in Live Vegetation

Human Appropriation of the World's Fresh Water Supply

Olson World Ecosystems

Forum: Perspectives on Sustainability in Ecological Applications, Vol. 3, No. 4, Nov., 1993

Glossary of Social Development Indicators (missing: but World Development Indficators

The World Gazetteer current population figures for cities, towns and places of all countries

On another subject, I made a list of terms that I think are candidates for our own Wikipedia/Glossary (though just how we might construct and maintain same is a bit vague at the moment), given here with dates from their appearance(s) above:

27ii hegemony
capital
capitalism
means of production
3iii stewardship (cf 27iii)
globali[z/s]ation (cf 13iii)
7iii terrorism
unipolar
11iii security
16iii secular trend
17iii commodification
20iii "Washington Consensus"
21iii sustainability
24iii _topia
25iii inequality
semi-periphery (and core and periphery)
neoliberal
2iv postmodern[ism]
3iv irredentism

A rumination on perspective, of 5iv:

Of what is 'perspective' composed? What are the dimensions and constituents, the modalities and the methods?

One stands in a Moment of Time and Space, and looks outward in multiple directions. What one "knows" is a product of experiences and influences;
what one "sees" is a product of what one is prepared to see, what visualization tools one commands, what data/information sources one attends to;
one is perpetually making choices among an extraordinary array of stimuli &ly;== streams of sense input from without --choices of what to attend to, what to ignore, what to filter, what to explore further.

We have at our senses' fingertips vastly greater information resources than former generations had (and therefore more that must be discarded), and potential perspectives that were simply unavailable, nonexistent 40 years ago, because of electronic/digital capabilities and remote sensing technologies. We have to learn to use these tools, constructively, responsibly, humanely. And we have to examine and refine and integrate into our very beings what it means to be "constructive", "responsible", and "humane". We must not take these for granted, or leave them to others to define and execute on our behalf, or in our name.

Some things from Annual Review of Sociology:

World-Systems Analysis Christopher Chase-Dunn; Peter Grimes (Ann Rev Sociol 1995 pp. 387-417)

This is a review of recent research on world-systems. We cover studies of the current system and studies that compare the contemporary global system with earlier, smaller intersocietal systems. Research on the cycles and secular trends found in the modern world-system is discussed at length. This includes an examination of economic cycles of various lengths as well as their links with broader cycles like the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers, international financial crises, and the cycle of global war. We also survey recent studies of core-periphery hierarchy.

STATES AND MARKETS IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION Seán Ó Riain (Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2000. 26:187-213)

The paper considers how states and markets shape one another at the national and world-system levels and how globalization is transforming that relationship. This process is illustrated through a review of research on liberal, social rights, developmental, and socialist states in the postwar capitalist economy. These state models were reconciled with expanding international markets through a series of controls on trade and capital flows. Globalization has undermined many of these controls so that states must increasingly integrate themselves into local and global networks. States are experimenting with organizational and strategic changes nationally and internationally in order to respond to a networked economy and polity. Neoliberal institutions are the dominant force shaping the relation between states and markets in the contemporary era, but alternative state-society alliances are emerging to contest the hegemony of neoliberalism in shaping globalization.

IS GLOBALIZATION CIVILIZING, DESTRUCTIVE OR FEEBLE? A CRITIQUE OF FIVE KEY DEBATES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCE LITERATURE Mauro F. Guillén (Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2001. 27:235-260)

The sociological, economic, political, and anthropological literatures are devoting increasing attention to globalization. This chapter discusses the various connotations of the term and puts it in historical perspective. Existing theoretical and empirical research on globalization is organized around five key issues or questions: Is it really happening? Does it produce convergence? Does it undermine the authority of nation-states? Is globality different from modernity? Is a global culture in the making? A plea is made for a comparative sociology of globalization that is sensitive to local variations and to how agency, interest, and resistance mediate in the relationship between globalization causes and outcomes.

GLOBAL ETHNOGRAPHY Zsuzsa Gille and Seán Ó Riain (Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2002. 28:271-295)

Globalization poses a challenge to existing social scientific methods of inquiry and units of analysis by destabilizing the embeddedness of social relations in particular communities and places. Ethnographic sites are globalized by means of various external connections across multiple spatial scales and porous and contested boundaries. Global ethnographers must begin their analysis by seeking out "place-making projects" that seek to define new kinds of places, with new definitions of social relations and their boundaries. Existing ethnographic studies of global processes tend to cluster under one of three slices of globalization—global forces, connections, or imaginations—each defined by a different kind of place-making project. The extension of the site in time and space poses practical and conceptual problems for ethnographers, but also political ones. Nonetheless, by locating themselves firmly within the time and space of social actors "living the global," ethnographers can reveal how global processes are collectively and politically constructed, demonstrating the variety of ways in which globalization is grounded in the local.

And from Ann Rev Political Science:

GLOBALIZATION AND POLITICS Suzanne Berger (Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2000. 3:43-62)

This chapter reviews the issues at stake in current public and scholarly debates over the impact of changes in the international economy on domestic politics and society. Over the past two decades, there have been dramatic increases in the flow of portfolio capital, foreign direct investment, and foreign exchange trading across borders at the same time as barriers to trade in goods and services have come down. These changes raise many new questions about the effects of trade and capital mobility on the autonomy of nation-states and the relative power in society of various groups. The first signs of realignments within and between political parties of both the left and the right over issues of national independence and trade openness suggest a rich new terrain for political inquiry

...and Annual Review of Public Health 2003 issue has several articles on GIS

An abstract from World Development, an Elsevier journal:

The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know It
Branko Milanovic
World Bank, Washington, DC, USA
Volume 31, Issue 4, April 2003, Pages 667-683
Abstract
The paper shows that the current view of globalization as an automatic and benign force is flawed: it focuses on only one, positive, face of globalization while entirely neglecting the malignant one. The two key historical episodes that are adduced by the supporters of the "globalization as it is" (the Halcyon days of the 1870–1913, and the record of the last two decades of development) are shown to be misinterpreted. The "Halcyon days" were never Halcyon for those who were "globalized" through colonization since colonial constraints prevented them from industrializing. The record of the last two decades (1978–98) is shown to be almost uniformly worse than that of the previous two (1960–78).

HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES AND ACTIVITIES (a bibliography)

Dam and Reservoir Impact and Information Archive (not maintained lately, unfortunately)

7 April
CIA's Global Trends 2015 (text of the whole thing [actually released Dec 2000] cached at acadprojwww.wlu.edu/vol4/BlackmerH/public_html/mypdfs/globaltrends2015.pdf --see a blogger's summary, and a commentary from Buckminster Fuller Institute)

Four Alternative Global Futures

Global Issues of the Twenty-First Century United Nations Challenges AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY by Christopher Spencer

Another version: Global Trends: 1980-2015 and Beyond by Bradford De Long, University of California, Berkeley, under contract with Industry Canada, 1998 (cached at /mypdfs/delong.pdf)

Public Health mapping from WHO --see also Global Atlas of Infectious Disease

Clary-Meuser Research Network (maps of SARS, among other things --they publish Right-To-Know Atlas of the United States CD)

EPA Toxic Release Inventory (TRI Explorer for data --see also state data files)

The Global Threat of New and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: Reconciling U.S. National Security and Public Health Policy Jennifer Brower, Peter Chalk (RAND) --chapters available for download. Others include Faultlines of Conflict in Central Asia and the South Caucasus: Implications for the U.S. Army Olga Oliker, Thomas Szayna, eds. and Terrorism and Development: Using Social and Economic Development Policies to Inhibit a Resurgence of Terrorism Kim Cragin, Peter Chalk

The Zapatista "Social Netwar" in Mexico David F. Ronfeldt, John Arquilla, Graham E. Fuller, Melissa Fuller ...and The Advent of Netwar John Arquilla, David F. Ronfeldt

comment from Netwar Against the EZLN (Originally published in La Jornada, 8/29/99, by Lourdes Galaz translated by Leslie Lopez) :
...it is worthwhile to bring to bear some of the conclusions from the document, "The Advent of Netwar" (1996), prepared for the US Secretary of Defense Office by analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt of the National Defense Research Institute in Santa Monica, California. These analysts say that the zapatista movement--which rose up in arms on January first, 1994--has ushered in an epistemological rupture and a new model which helps us not only to understand the new movements and social actors of the 90's, but "to build new concepts necessary to develop perspectives on military organization, doctrine, strategies and technologies." According to the analysts and military strategists, zapatismo--"born out of the EZLN"--which has been joined by different sectors of Mexican and international society, could be considered a new paradigm, characterizing other social conflicts in the new world order, now that the Cold War is over. They say we need a new term to focus our attention on the fact that conflicts and crimes based on network structures are on the rise. In this perspective, the term "social netwar" applied to the EZLN is related to the low-intensity conflicts at the extreme end of the social spectrum.

In 1998, the same researchers prepared another document, "The Zapatista Social Netwar," in which they warn that netwar "will probably be the most prevalent and challenging form of conflict in the emergent information age," leading them to recommend a "careful and sustained" study of the phenomenon. The netwar strategy is focused on analyzing and containing, isolating, de-structuring and immobilizing--and even annihilating--social networks, like those pertaining to narcotraffic, to terrorists, and other delinquent groups. According to "The Zapatista Social Netwar," strategy ought to focus not just on the EZLN, but on all organizations, fronts and individuals who form part of the broad zapatista support network (in which leadership is diluted). Thus, the analysts recommend, all kinds of actions and tactics should be imposed, from classic counterinsurgency methods (harrassment, threats, psychological actions, kidnapings, paramilitary group attacks, individual executions, etcetera) to disinformation campaigns, espionage, the creation of NGO's financed by the government as a counterpoint to the independent ones (linked to the network), among others.

Globalization's Security Implications Lynn E. Davis, RAND Issue Paper

From Google Hacks:

Google's News Search supports two special syntaxes.

intitle:
Finds words in an article headline.
intitle:miners

site:
Finds articles from a particular source. Unfortunately, Google News does not offer a list of its over 4,000 sources so you have to guess a little when you're looking around.
miners site:bbc.co.uk

8 April
from Undernews:

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind." - Edward L. Bernays, the father of American propaganda
(see Wikipedia entry, wich includes this: "In a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter described Bernays and Ivy Lee as "professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism and self-interest." And history itself showed the flaw in Bernays’s claim that "manipulation of the masses" is natural and necessary in a democratic society..." ...and he was Freud's nephew, too.)

AGE OF ACCESS Jeremy Rifkin --who comes in for frequent calumny)

Worldwide Manpower Distribution by Geographical Area US military, September 2002 (from http://www.dior.whs.mil/MMID/PUBS.HTM) --see also by year, 1950-1999

9 April
From World-System Network listserv:

In a message dated 4/8/2003 7:12:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
larondin@yahoo.com writes:

> I have a question. Ken says that the world-economy has been
> depressed for the past 3 decades. The general understanding among
> world-systems people is that the world-economy entered a B-wave in the
> Kondratieff cycle as early as 1968, and no later than the early 1970s.
> Are we still riding that B-wave, 35 years down the road? Isn't this a
> longish time, and can anybody reasonably forecast the arrival of an A-wave
> any time soon? Or is Kondratieff no longer working?
> 
> Warren
> 

I was reading a book the other day claiming Alan Greenspan had wrecked the 
Kondradieff cycles because he was onto the peaks and troughs and started 
tinkering. Be that as it may....
I share the bafflement with the Kondratieff phenomenon. The most sensible 
explanation for the inexplicable arcana of the phenomenon is that it simply 
reflects natural, but not inherently organized, cycles of technical 
innovation since the Industrial Revolution. That creates a series of very 
rough cycles which are hard to analyze further. Steam... then the turn of the 
twentieth century phase, then the new information technologies. It does 
roughly divide the history into three (or is it four) phases since the great 
takeoff at the end of the eighteenth. 

The point about Greenspan is more than a serious joke. As we interact with 
any set of mechanical cycles we inherently observe, hence interact and modify 
their action. 
John Landon
Website for
World History and the Eonic Effect
http://eonix.8m.com
Blogzone
http://www.xanga.com/nemonemini

Reserve to Production Ratios for Top Ten Oil Producing Nations (US DOE --and see the achive of Facts of the Week)

Center for the Study of Emerging Infections: SARS

Counterpoise (...a quarterly review journal that makes independent points of view widely accessible to librarians, scholars and activists)

10 April
Behind the Invasion of Iraq from rupe-india

SEVERE ACUTE RESPIRATORY SYNDROME (SARS) EPIDEMIOLOGICAL TRACKING from humanitarian.net

Globalization, International Law, and Emerging Infectious Diseases David P. Fidler, J.D.

11 April
The Bay Area Geographic Information Survey: Results and Prospects for the Metadata Catalog - Featured Paper By Mike Skowronek, Bruce Joffe From Metropolitan Transportation

THE CHERNOBYL SARCOPHAGUS PROJECT OF THE FRENCH-GERMAN INITIATIVE - ACHIEVEMENTS AND PROSPECTS Chornobyl Center for Nuclear Safety, Radioactive Waste and Radioecology Gunter G. Pretzsch, GRS, Berlin, Germany Veronique Lhomme, IRSN, Fontenay-Aux-Roses, France Alexander N. Seleznev, Chornobyl Centre, Kiev, Ukraine Eugene S. Seredynin, ECOMM, Ukraine

Monmonier, Mark S
Cartographies of danger : mapping hazards in America / Mark Monmonier
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1997
Science Library GB5014 .M66 1997

Many to Many (Flemming Funch )

For a single person or a small group, everything can be connected. You can keep track of all issues or ideas. You can coordinate your activities directly, and you can have a consensus on things. You can even do that amongst a small network of people who have separate weblogs. But when it goes beyond a certain scale, maybe 20 people, maybe 100, the coherence falls apart, and you inevitably get to deal with more of a crap shoot. You speak, but you're not sure who'll hear you. You seek and you'll find things, but you'll never know if you get the complete picture. People who really ought to speak with each other might not find each other. Pieces of information that really ought to be correlated with each other might never be. It is hard to know what is good, better and best. Hard to know what is true and what is not. Hard to see the context of people and information and activities. Mostly it is fuzzy, haphazard guesswork. Or it is just the old fashioned approaches of asking around, doing due dilligence, following your instincts.

The Making of an Icon Soraya de Chadarevian Science Apr 11 2003: 255-257

At the 50-year celebrations, in April 2003, of James Watson and Francis Crick's proposal of the double-helical structure of DNA, one image will be hard to avoid: the photograph of the two researchers staged left and right of their Meccano-like model. The black-and-white image comes in two versions. One picture shows Crick with a slide rule in his hand pointing up toward the model. In the other (slightly less staged) version of the picture, the arm has moved down, and instead of gazing at their model, Watson and Crick half-face each other and the viewer, laughing. Although both images are in wide circulation, the second one is reproduced somewhat less frequently (some refer to it as the "lesser" print in contrast to the "true" or "classic" picture).

The pictures, taken 50 years ago by Cambridge photographer Antony Barrington Brown in the Cavendish Laboratory, have come to symbolize the Nobel Prize- winning achievement of the two researchers and its far-reaching impact, as well as scientific achievement more generally. The restaging of the classic photograph, nearly 40 years later, with Watson and Crick adopting the same poses, bears testimony to the iconic status of the image

ProMed Mail for timely updates (International Society for Infectious Diseases)

Dark Continents: A Critique of Internet Metageographies Terry Harpold ...see also Harpold's notes, and Of Bugs & Rats: Cyber-Cleanliness, Cyber-Squalor and the Fantasy-Spaces of Informational Globalization (also at Project Muse) by Terry Harpold & Kavita Philip

Ecological Fallacy:

Ecological Inference and the Ecological Fallacy by David A. Freedman

The Ecological Fallacy Paul A. Jargowsky

On Teaching Ecological Fallacy (Oliver Rackham, in TEG News, British Ecological Society, 1990)

The present ought to be a golden age for teaching ecology, but it is not. Political ecology has become a force at which Prime Ministers shudder; but this has not been matched by the growth in the study or dissemination of ecology as a science. The public's attention has been drawn to ecology, but where is the increase in public understanding? Popular misconceptions about plants and animals and the environment are repeated and recirculated and grow in retelling. What good will political ecology do if it is based on misunderstanding the facts of real ecology?

...We live in an age in which accuracy is called pedantry; presenting both sides of an argument is called complacency; and who says something is considered more important than whether it is true. The line between education and entertainment is dangerously thin.

AnthroGlobe Social Science Map Server

This server contains data sets in support of research projects in anthropology, linguistics, human geography, archaeology, ethnic studies and other social sciences. While the information presented here does not have a singular focus, the majority of the projects found here are related to spatially integrated approaches in the social sciences. More specifically, the web pages and data sets presented here, both public and private are related to the relationship between human populations and the environment.

Out of the past, in the present, and for the future of the Maya Forest Anabel Ford and Keith Clarke

Wired World Atlas ("Envision the globe according to the density of traditional media - TVs and telephones - and you get a brand-new map")

PSI Network map

Scrap and Recycling

Remote Sensing of Scrap Tires: Vector Source, Ohio Valley

The EPA estimates 3 billion tires currently litter the landscape of the USA and the pile grows by 300,000 every year. Public health authorities have become obsessed with tire disposal; nearly every state has new laws and new taxes on tire disposal. Unfortunately, these measures lead to a great deal of illegal dumping. When landfills are closed to tires (very frequent at present), the tires get dumped in rural or wilderness areas when nobody is looking. Furtive tire piles can result in major disease foci... tires can be differentiated at several points in the infrared region of the spectrum. Imagery of several tire piles located in rural and urban environments were acquired, using an airplane flying at 250, 500, and 900 meters altitude. These images have been digitized and are currently being analyzed

...and see Scrap Tire News, Scrap tire facts, Mosquitoes, Disease and Scrap Tires (RI Office of Mosquito Abatement Coordination) --and also google 'scrap tires' search ...and Scrap (Published by the Instituteof Scrap Recycling Industries)

Junk Bond: How Your Trash Helps Fuel Boom In China's Economy, --- Rising Exports of U.S. Scrap Provide Raw Material For Car Parts, Newsprint --- Journey of a Boy's Homework (Wall Street Journal; New York, N.Y.; Apr 9, 2003; By Jon E. Hilsenrath)

EXPOSING the FRAUD: Recycling Programs Gone Wrong...

"Remember, what you toss always ends up somewhere." -From the Hewlett Packard website

The debate of whether it is better to recycle or remanufacture toner cartridges has raged for years between printer manufacturers and the aftermarket. To the poor people of Guiyu, China, the answer is crystal clear.

Heaps of empty cartridges line the streets and riversides after being scavenged for their toner. Once the toner is swept out by fingers or paintbrushes, the plastic carcasses and other electronic refuse are burned--fouling the air-- or discarded along the Lianjiang River. This type of dumping has rendered the area's drinking water not potable; the river has 200 times the acceptable levels of acid and 2,400 time acceptable levels of lead.

Many residents have developed respiratory problems. A local school survey found that 100 of the 1,000 students have severe asthma of other respiratory afflictions.

The residents here have to choose between utter poverty and pollution levels akin to poisoning. The net gain for the average laborer? Roughly $1.50 per day.

Guiyu, China, has become the world's dumping ground for what is defined as "e-waste". "Exporting Harm", a 54-page report issued by the Basel Action Network (BAN), exposed the environmental horrors in this small town. Toner cartridges comprise a large portion of the town's problems. (see Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition page --and compare China's hi-tech toxics from BBC, and google 'guiyu recycling' search)

Center for Health Applications of Aerospace Related Technologies [CHAART] Projects by disease, from NASA

World Oil Consumption, Production, and Reserves dataset [Joe Kerski] (R:/oil/)

12 April
measurable corruption? (from JFB)

I went through the exercise of snagging these data from the Web and massaging them to result in a map (here). A daunting series of steps, but perhaps worth detailing as an example.

World Happiness Database

google "global trade" and toxics

The Four Global Toxics Treaties -- "The Package of Four"
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO's) Involved in Human Rights & the Environment Issues

google "pollution credits"

NAFTA AT SEVEN: Its impact on workers in all three nations (US, Canada, Mexico)

CIVIL SOCIETY AND GLOBAL TRADE IN SOUTHERN AND EASTERN AFRICA (from Sweden's Forum Syd)

13 April
World Dams Dataset: 57,706 entries, 2002 data... academic pricing: $95 for the whole thing
(I've saved the demo data in r:/global/alldams/dams/ --potentially useful is the admin.txt file

The goal of the Dams and Development Project is to "promote a dialogue on improving decision-making, planning and management of dams and their alternatives based on the World Commission on Dams (WCD) core values and strategic priorities." See Large Dams Cross-Check Survey ...and overview (Nov 2000)

Global Map of Irrigated Areas ("The map shows the amount of area equiped for irrigation around 1995 as a percentage of the total area on a raster with a resolution of 5 minutes...") --dataset at R:/global/irrig/gmia.mxd, see Eurasia and Americas images

GIS Viewer: California Dams and Dams Within Jurisdiction of the State of California Department of Water Resources (1395 dams... see overview image) from UC Berkeley Digital Library Geographic Data

Nebraska cartogram (isoanimation)

Nebraska Immigrants 1990-2000

Where Have all the Packing Plants Gone?

Cartograms (from JTAP Electronic Historical Atlas (see purloined example)

isodemographic map of Canada, 1972, Isodemographic Map Showing 1997 Federal Election Results, THE ELECTIONMAPPER - A COOPERATIVE PROJECT FOR SHOWING GEOSPATIAL DATA By Paul Harker and James Lee

A Constraint-Based Continuous Cartogram Method (with several nice examples)

1918 Influenza

Internet Web Site Support for Chapter II, Parts C and D of the Human Geography Outline Political Organization of Space ...including links to

an animated map of the United States which shows the sex ratio from 1790-1990

IDB Population Pyramids (animated)

14 April
Map of Freedom 2001 ...see more on the origins of data

Since its inception in the 1970s, Freedom House's Freedom in the World survey has provided an annual evaluation of political rights and civil liberties throughout the world. The survey attempts to judge all countries and territories by a single standard, emphasizing the importance of democracy and freedom. At a minimum, a democracy is a political system in which the people choose their authoritative leaders freely from among competing groups and individuals who are not designated by the government. Freedom is the opportunity to act spontaneously in a variety of fields outside the control of the government and other centers of potential domination.

The survey rates countries and territories based on real-world situations caused by state and nongovernmental factors, rather than on governmental intentions or legislation alone. Freedom House does not rate governments per se, but rather the rights and freedoms enjoyed by individuals in each country or territory. The survey team does not base its judgment solely on the political conditions in a country or territory (e.g., war, terrorism), but by the effect that these conditions have on freedom.

Freedom House does not maintain a culture-bound view of democracy. The survey demonstrates that there are free states with varying forms of democracy functioning among people of all races and religions. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of democracies in developing countries, and the survey reflects their growing numbers. To reach its conclusions, the survey team employs a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, nongovernmental organization publications, think tank and academic analyses, and individual professional contacts.

UNDP World Income Inequality Database and World Bank site on Inequality, Poverty, and Socio-economic Performance

Made a clean Inequality dataset, /global/utip.shp [built from UTIP data]. See Measuring the Evolution of Inequality in the Global Economy (UTIP No.7)

This paper provides a summary of information in the UTIP data set on the evolution of industrial earnings inequality in the global economy. At present the data set covers 66 countries, with annual observations going back to 1972 in most cases and to 1963 in many. Our measure of changing inequality, based on the group-wise decomposition of the Theil statistic across industrial categories, appears to be a sensitive barometer of political and economic conditions in many countries, and the percentage change in this index appears to be meaningfully comparable across countries. We also measure and detect regional patterns of similarity in the movement of inequality through time.

"My concern is with pay. It is with the distribution of pay, with the economic and social relationship between the well-paid and the poorly paid, between the working prosperous and the working poor. Since the early 1980 inequality of pay has risen sharply, both within nations and between them. Everyone knows this. The issue that divides the economics profession is: why?

Has the increase in world-wide openness to trade worsened global income inequality? (Saurav Dev Bhatta, Papers in Regional Science 2002)

Penn World Tables

In /mypdfs/ is the file pwt61.dbf which should be a properly-formatted Penn World Table dataset... the Access database (from which it was derived) pwt61.mdb is in r:/global/. Now my problem is how to EXTRACT data from specific years for all countries...

I used the Access 'Filter records by using the Adsvanced Filter/Sort window' to draw the data for the year 2000 from the whole dataset, then exported that as a .dbf (/global/pwt2000.dbf) and JOINed on the isocode field... and it WORKED...

see /global/pwtlabels.txt for translation of the various bits...

15 April
Tutorial for Penn World Tables data in ArcMap

The Myth of the Flat Earth (Norman Swartz) --Cosmas Indicopleustes and all that

Inequality in America (World Socialist Website)

Economic Policy Institute --see Pulling Apart: a state-by-state analysis of income trends

U.S. county Gini index data (mypdfs/ineq90.dbf)

In R:/global/sutton is the nightlights raster data... from Paul Sutton

For Richer (inequality article by Paul Krugman, New York Times Magazine 20 Oct 2002)

16 April
Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems

grabbed Olson dataset (R:/global/olson/) --see quick look ...and ORNL DAAC NPP Database, which has detailed data and links to LANDSAT coverage for various sites

world forest cover ppt image ...see cached set (from World Resources Institute. See 2003-2004 Guide to World Resources)

Groundwater and Desalinization table
Freshwater Resources and Withdrawals table

US inequality: /global/usinequal.mxd

ScanJet driver

17 April
UN/DPI NGO site ("The site for information exchange among NGOs")

WHO SARS page

UN Observer and International Report ("An Independent Journal of International Affairs")

International Journal of Health Geographics

The application of geographical information systems to important public health problems in Africa Frank C Tanser and David le Sueur

Geographic boundaries in breast, lung and colorectal cancers in relation to exposure to air toxics in Long Island, New York Geoffrey M Jacquez, Dunrie A Greiling International Journal of Health Geographics 2003, 2: 4 and Local clustering in breast, lung and colorectal cancer in Long Island, New York

The use of interactive graphical maps for browsing medical/health Internet information resources Maged N Kamel Boulos

HEALTHCYBERMAP.ORG (from Ron)

18 April
Kineman and Hastings Monthly Generalized Global Vegetation Index

The Drama of the Commons Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, Elinor Ostrom, Thomas Dietz, Nives Dolsak, Paul C. Stern, Susan Stonich, and Elke U. Weber, Editors, National Research Council

20 April
Portolans

Portolan Charts from U Minn

In the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, maps called "portolan charts" recorded the accumulated experience and wisdom of generations of Mediterranean seafarers. Portolan charts were practical, no-nonsense tools made for the use of sailors who sailed "great waters." As Tony Campbell, Map Librarian of the British Map Library put it so well: "The medieval mappaemundi (world maps in the Christian tradition) are the cosmographies of thinking landsmen. By contrast, the portolan charts preserve the Mediterranean sailors firsthand experience of their own sea, as well as their expanding knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean" (Campbell 1987, 372).

Campbell’s "Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500," is one of the essays in The History of Cartography, volume one (Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean) edited by J.B. Harley and David Woodward. This is the most important recent scholarly examination of portolan charts and their history, and anyone studying the pre-1500 portolan charts should refer to it. Campbell’s work has been essential to this commentary. Campbell summarizes existing research on portolan charts and suggests further study for a better understanding of them. Fewer than 100 portolan charts made prior to 1500 have survived. Of these, the three fifteenth-century portolan charts in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota are the subject of this commentary.

from mappa.mundi.net

The Ottoman Conquest of Armenia from a Portolan Italian Chart of Lesi (Licini, Patrizia. Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 1-2 (1997-98-99): 56-65)

from Annie:

AUTHOR       Casey, Edward S., 1939-
TITLE        Representing place : landscape painting and maps / Edward S. 
               Casey.
IMPRINT      Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2002.
CALL NO.     ND1340 .C38 2002.

TITLE        In the wake of Columbus : islands and controversy / edited by 
               Louis De Vorsey, Jr., and John Parker.
IMPRINT      Detriot : Wayne State University Press, 1985.
CONTENTS     The Columbus landfall problem / John Parker -- Columbus landed on
               Caicos / Pieter Verhoog -- Columbus's first landing place / 
               Oliver Dunn -- The Diario de Colón, a legacy of poor 
               transcription, translation, and interpretation / Robert H. 
               Fuson -- In the wake of Columbus on a portolan chart / James E.
               Kelley, Jr. -- A new approach to the Columbus landfall / Arne
               B. Molander -- The discovery of Columbus's island passage to 
               Cuba, October 12-27, 1492 / Robert H. Power -- The Diario, or 
               Journal, of Columbus's first voyage / Oliver Dunn.
CALL NO.     E112 .I63 1985.

example 1

example 2

example 3

Ingold 12

Hsuan Tsang's route [Xuanzang] and overview, and Hsuan Tsang his own very, very self ...and another rendering (from http://www.silk-road.com/artl/hsuantsang.shtml). Lots more via google search

Waldseemüller

South Africa map

U Minn summary and 1507 wall map --see a recent news story about its significance. Images small and large of 1516 version

Bill Thoen on origins of the compass rose

rare maps from the State Library of NSW ...amazing

Mercator maps in detail

Ptolemy's world from U Minn (nice detail)

Pickles 8

'Corporate personhood'

MetalClad:

NAFTA ruling raises environmental questions Mexico ordered to pay California-based Metalclad $16.7-million after municipality blocks plans for a hazardous waste dump
HEATHER SCOFFIELD
September 1, 2000 Globe and Mail (Toronto) Ottawa --

Mexico has lost a major NAFTA investor lawsuit that could have serious implications for Canada's ability to pass environmental regulations and may even affect the way that Toronto disposes of its garbage.

An independent tribunal under the North American free-trade agreement ruled this week that Mexico must pay California-based Metalclad Corp. a total of $16.7-million (U.S.) as compensation for a Mexican municipality's refusal to allow the company to run a hazardous waste dump.

The decision is proof that NAFTA and the environment are at odds, and that municipalities will have a tough time turning away garbage if foreign corporations are involved, said Michelle Swenarchuk of the Canadian Environmental Law Association.

"NAFTA is saying, you can have your local rules for dumping, but if a foreign company wants to dump . . . it can force you to pay," Ms. Swenarchuk said yesterday. "This case is a terrible example of how necessary environmental controls can become near impossible for local communities."
(from http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/elan/2000/msg00871.html)

The 'Metalclad' Decision Under NAFTA's Chapter 11 Stephen L. Kass and Jean M. McCarroll , New York Law Journal

The NAFTA ruling on Metalclad vs. Mexico - The Broader Context - Gerard Greenfield, CAW

U.S. State Department summary

Hazardous Waste: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Piles of Poisons in Mexico By Jennifer Clapp

GIS Data Used in the Risk Asessment EPA Hazardous Waste Combustion

Forest fragmentation geoTIFF (in /global/forest ) --see also GLOBAL LAND COVER CHARACTERIZATION (GLCC) datasets and GLCC version 2 in /global/glcc/ (see legend for codes. Not sure how to get these into ArcMap. Also grabbed East Asia, thinking that the transformation to useable form might be easier with something smaller than the whole globe...)

Global Invasive Species Database

20 April
The Strategist And The Philosopher, By Alain Frachon et Daniel Vernet From Le Monde April 15, 2003

Who are these neoconservatives who are playing an essential role in the U.S. president's choices, along with fundamentalist Christians? And who were the thinkers who inspired them, Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss?

It was said in a tone of sincere praise: "You are some of the best brains in our country"; so good, George W. Bush added, that "my government employs about twenty of you." The president was speaking on February 26 to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. (Le Monde, March 20)

the Course Page: http://courses.wlu.edu/Intr/03Spring/INTR131%20and%20INTR132/

histogram settings for nightsky

Human Geographies (Paul Talbot, U Colorado, Fall 2002)

A New Grand Strategy by Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne (Atlantic Jan 2002)

For more than fifty years American foreign policy has sought to prevent the emergence of other great powers-a strategy that has proved burdensome, futile, and increasingly risky. The United States will be more secure, and the world more stable, if America now chooses to pass the buck and allow other countries to take care of themselves.

radwaste.org ("the primary purpose of this site is to provide a reference source for radioactive waste management professionals...")

Africa maps

21 April
links to many maps